There were centralized services. And they're bad. Financial censorship is a very real issue. Such is the reason why Bitcoin is so important. And then what followed were centralized exchanges, custodial wallets, KYC, and so on forth. It makes me wonder whether we really wanted to do away with those centralized services in the first place. Or are we still at the mercy of central authorities? Or perhaps most of us are still indifferent to it for as long as it is not affecting us? You are censored, I'm not, no problem at all.

Comes as no surprise, really. PayPal has long been supportive of the government and are otherwise quite complicit with whatever the government wants to do. While it is true that centralized services exposed you to risks like this, especially when their operation hinges on the government regulations, it doesn't mean all are bad.

There are still services which are far more transparent and are willing to challenge the government for the sake of their user. Anything to do with financial systems will always be under government influence, unfortunately. Except Bitcoin of course , not most exchanges though.

This should be more important for all those people who got excited when the news about "Paypal letting its users buy bitcoin" came out and we realized that they also don't let any of their users withdraw those bitcoins and essentially they wanted to turn into a custodial wallet and be in full control of the users' bitcoins just like they are in full control of their USD.

Well, if we want to stop these centralized services from taking over, we better do something right now because they are slowly takiing advantage of decentralized market and trying to make it a centralized one and I don't think that you will disagree with that because it is true. Make another revolutionary platform that will keep the centralized institutions at bay is one thing that we can consider, anything to .ake these central invasion a bit hard for them.

Can you imagine if you couldn't access your money:

* because you are black? white? male? female? gay? straight? religious? atheist? young? old?
* because you were republican/democrat/socialist/libertarian?
* because you didn't follow a random guideline properly (like you were closer than 2 meters/6 feet to someone)?

Luckily these aren't currently the case, but society can change quickly, and these should be prevented from happening.

I bought a gift card code that wasn't working via Paypal.
I filed a dispute and I escalated to a claim,providing all the necessary screenshots as an evidence.
I lost the claim,because digital items aren't under buyer protection anymore.
This means that you can buy some corrupted pdf file from a scammer and you won't get your money back,even if you provide all the evidence that the file is corrupted.
Paypal got from bad to worse in the last 7-8 years.
Some crypto casinos and crypto exchange platforms aren't any better than Paypal.

Excerpt from the article:


Wish the "Uncensored Internet" means having access to the Truth and contents that are good/safe for consumers and society. And you should be able to handle the Truth and use it for society good.
I was reading through the article to understand the real reason for the censorship, and whether it's justified...didn't see much
By the way, I wonder if he is considering using other services that could offer him transparency, censorship resistant and control over his fund?



 People need to be careful how much they put into the accounts of people/business that can easily run away with customers funds. Probably safer to try businesses that use mutisig to secure customers funds. If they must be used , they should be those with good track record and trustworthy admins.
Don't take big risk or gamble on exchanges or even betting sites

Just imagine if same thing starts to happen in near future with ''digital wallets'' that are staring to roll out in EU, and they hold your identity, money, access to internet, private and public websites.
If you are not good obedient citizen they just turn the switch OFF for your digital wallet and you are can't access anything anymore, and we are doing this in the middle of so called russian cyber attacks by hackers who attack oil and meat industry.... 
They say this wallet is not compulsory for now but I am sure they will enforce it future with their release of their digital euro CBDC.

https://archive.ph/q9pcs

I can just imagine frustration on their faces when they realize there is no way to shut down your Bitcoin address and there is no account to close

Yeah, the whole be your own bank thing is going to pieces, when this so-called mainstream hit we saw more and more people using centralized exchanges, depositing their coins on centralized wallets even lying to themselves they are using a bitcoin card when they are actually using a visa card with another 3rd party solution behind it. I have a feeling everyone says "not your keys not your coins" then suddenly checks his finance account to see if his coins are still there, as far as I can see we have just exchanged banks with another type of banks, people rush to deposit their coins for staking or of interest in platforms that are ten times shadier than banks but, nothing you can do about it anymore.

Probably the percentage of bitcoin owners that still holds their coins in their own wallet and cold storage is decreasing day by day, that aspect of censorship-resistant transactions is getting ignored, people are just interested in %$, we probably need another serious shake-out but I wonder if it's not late or that the damage won't have any other repercussions.

But in the end, there is nothing we can do, for most people convenience is the key, that's why Bisq has 30 BTCvolume and Binance 100k BTC


Hmm, not really the best argument against PayPal, if you would have bought it with bitcoin the results would have been the same.